In the business world, reports are often used to inform a reader about selected topics of interest so that information can be used to provide a general view on the subject in hand, to drive decision making, etc. Reports may also include persuasive elements, such as recommendations, suggestions, or other motivating conclusions that indicate possible future actions the report reader could take. There are different types of business reporting, for example, informational reporting, analytical reporting, operational reporting, and so on.
A business organization typically uses multiple business applications for a variety of functions. Traditionally, data warehousing has been used to facilitate reporting and analysis across the multiple business applications. Data warehousing increases the total cost of ownership (TCO). Further, using a data warehouse for operational reporting may lead to difficulties caused by replication of large amount of data and providing such data in-time. For example, in order to generate a report, predefined content of data is determined and replicated in the data warehouse. The predefined content is usually a small subset of the available data in a transactional system, such as Online Transactional Processing (OLTP). Since the operational reporting is to be used by every employee in a company at all levels of the organization, the determination of adequate predefined reporting content becomes very difficult, as each employee may require different data and may need a different report. Thus, large amounts of data have to be replicated at the data warehouse to support all possible scenarios for operational reporting. This not only increases cost but also makes real-time reporting and analysis extremely hard.
Therefore, there is a need for a system and method that provides infrastructure components and enhanced scheme to allow integrated real time reporting and analytics across business applications that are deployed on different systems or tenants.